Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, provides powerful data warehouse solutions for the retail, manufacturing, communications, travel, financial and insurance industries. These solutions combine Teradata's high-performance parallel database technology, a full suite of data access and management tools, robust data mining capabilities, world-class scalable hardware, and the most experienced data warehousing consultants.
Teradata has developed and documented the best practices and techniques to be used in the planning and development of high performance, reliable data warehouse solutions. These practices and techniques are collected together and organized into a methodology referred to as Teradata Solutions Methodology or TSM.
TSM is a system development methodology that describes, among other things, the methods, processes, tools, techniques, work products, skill sets, job assignments and project management requirements for data warehouse projects, and defines a framework for strategic and tactical data warehouse planning, design, implementation, maintenance and support. TSM is designed to allow multiple consulting, vendor and customer organizations to cooperate on a single project by sharing work activities, as well as to support world-wide deployment by the ability to define text in different languages. Project planning and time capture are integral parts of TSM with work assignments and tracking handled through a web interfaces. The methodology itself is stored in a relational database, thus facilitating the development, maintenance and use of TSM.
Methodology is essentially about communication—accurate, clear, precise and complete communication between the many individuals who will participate in the design and implementation of a data warehouse solution. The Teradata Solution Methodology outlines a sequence of procedures dictated by the needed inputs required to produce the next set of deliverables. It fosters clear project management based on an engineering approach. The result of methodology should be improved margins. The improvement in communications fosters growth, which depends on fast acclimation of new associates and coordination with business partners.
Historically, the Teradata Methodology has had low usage of formally developed, standard templates and processes. However, as Teradata continues to expand its professional services organization, array of solutions, and customer base, an efficient and consistent manner for preparing professional services employees and developing data warehouse solutions is desired. To this end, Teradata has developed TSM tools that assist a project manager in explicitly following the methodology by providing:                Estimating tools to rightsize the methodology steps to reduce risk of schedule overruns,        Customization tools of the standard methodology to create a methodology plan for the specific solution and customer expectations,        Generation of Standard Statements of Work based on customization of the Teradata Solution Methodology,        Creation of a custom web site for an engagement to manage completed and revised work product,        Creation of a standard Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to allow analysis of project variance, tracking of associate experience levels, and linking of work product back to the specific steps in the methodology that created it, and        Mechanized collection of completed work product for archival storage to facilitate the next engagement of Teradata Professional Services at the customer site, analysis of the usage of tools for improvement opportunities, and identification of examples of best practices to assist associates in executing similar engagements in the future.        
Traditional system development methodologies provide very few tools, if any to help the project planner determine the impact of these decisions and, once the decisions are made, to create the project plan and track execution against that plan.